On “My Brother’s Keeper,” the centerpiece of Jefferson Fox’s
new album, “Chronicles of Harvey,” Fox sings about stumbling down the stony
road to hell.

He hardly stumbles on the song, though, and listeners certainly won’t
feel as if they’ve been subjected to three and a half minutes of hell. Fox
delivers a slow-burnin’ musical sermon of sorts. It unfolds like a Eudora
Welty short story, and Tim Gill captures every dramatic twist on his video
for the song.

His music, which titters between folk and blues, relies largely on his
witty writing. But it’s his voice, craggy and expressive, that adds the
flavor.

My grandmother, an old Appalachian mountain woman, certainly could have
related to his minimalist style, filled with emotion, on tunes such as “Over
These Hills” and “World is Flat.” She might have liked the peppier “Bait and
Switch,” too, because Fox sounds almost like a Baptist preacher.

He sounds a bit like like an old bluesman on “Soul for Sale,” and that’s
just fine with me.

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